Amazon’s Streaming Partners program, launched Tuesday, allows Prime members to add Showtime, Starz and “dozens” more video subscriptions to their Prime membership at slight discounts and with “self-service cancellation of any subscription at any time.” Subscriptions to Showtime and Starz are $8.99 per month through Amazon. It's billing the program to video providers as a fast track to cord cutters, and to consumers as a way to streamline their video subscriptions. Content providers can “reach a new set of highly engaged viewers with Amazon responsible for driving subscriber acquisition,” it said. Amazon also handles billing with credit cards already on file. In addition to “special Prime member pricing,” subscribers get the latest episodes available simultaneously with broadcast, single-account billing, one watch list across all subscriptions and integration with IMDb X-Ray, Amazon said. “The way people watch TV is changing, and customers need an easier way to subscribe to and enjoy multiple streaming subscriptions,” said Michael Paull, Amazon vice president-digital video. The program makes it easy for video providers to reach “highly engaged Prime members, many of whom are already frequent streamers,” Paull said. Additional content launch partners are A+E Network (Lifetime Movie Club), AMC (Shudder and SundanceNow Doc Club), BroadbandTV (Hooplakidz Plus), Cinedigm (Dove Channel, Docurama, CONtv), CuriosityStream, Defy Media (ScreenJunkies Plus), DramaFever (DramaFever Instant), FlixFling (Cinefest, Nature Vision, Warriors and Gangsters, Dox, Monsters and Nightmares), Gaia, Gravitas (Film Forum, Daring Docs, Fear Factory), IndieFlix (IndieFlix Shorts), Qello, Ring TV Boxing, RLJ Entertainment (Acorn TV, Urban Movie Channel, Acacia TV), Smithsonian (Smithsonian Earth) and Tribeca Short List. Showtime also announced a similar deal with Hulu last summer.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral argument Wednesday in Facebook v. Power Ventures. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has filed several amicus briefs supporting Power Ventures, said in a Monday news release that it will urge the 9th Circuit to dismiss Facebook's claim that Cayman Islands-based Power Ventures violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) when it created a Web-based tool permitting users to log into all of their social media accounts in one place and aggregate messages, friend lists and other data. Facebook sued Power Ventures in 2008 and claimed the company also violated the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (Can-Spam) Act, which prohibits sending unwanted emails with misleading information. In February 2012, U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Francisco granted Facebook’s motion for summary judgment (see 1202210105). In September 2013, Power Ventures was ordered to pay more than $3 million in damages to Facebook. Power Ventures CEO Steven Vachani appealed the ruling. EFF said Legal Fellow Jamie Williams will argue that the 9th Circuit "has already ruled that the CFAA must be interpreted narrowly to avoid transforming what was intended to be an anti-hacking statute into a law that could sweep up innocuous conduct. Criminalizing a routine process like switching IP addresses stifles innovation and harms consumers -- and it’s not what Congress had in mind." Facebook didn't comment Tuesday.

User numbers for infidelity app Ashley Madison are "bouncing back," and in Q3 hit where they were before the summer's high-profile data breach that resulted in millions of users being revealed (see 1507200017), said online security company AVG Technologies in a report Tuesday. "Perhaps in anticipation of a 'singleton' Christmas, dating and cheating apps, in general, saw an uptick in usage over the third quarter, with Ashley Madison competitor platforms MiuMeet and AnastasiaDate both joining the app in seeing a rise in numbers from the previous quarter," AVG said in a news release. The report highlights app usage trends, analyzing anonymous data from more than 1 million AVG Android app users.

Streaming video and audio account for more than 70 percent of North America's downstream Internet traffic in peak hours on fixed access networks, Sandvine said in a news release Monday. That's up from less than 35 percent five years ago, Sandvine said. The three top sources of video traffic on North American fixed access networks -- Netflix at 37.1 percent, Google's YouTube at 17.9 percent and Amazon Video at 3.1 percent -- all had an increase in traffic share over the course of the year, Sandvine said, and Netflix now has a bigger share of traffic than all streaming audio and video did five years ago. The growth in streaming video is driving down the share of fixed access bandwidth taken up by BitTorrent, from about 7 percent a year ago to 5 percent now, Sandvine said. The data comes from Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's complaint against Google on its student data tracking, collection and use practices is "serious because it alleges and provides persuasive evidence that Google continues to misrepresent its privacy practices in the same manner that the FTC found illegal twice -- before the 2012 election," wrote NetCompetition Chairman Scott Cleland in a blog post Thursday. NetCompetition members include AT&T, Comcast, CTIA, NCTA and Verizon, its website said. EFF's petition filed with the FTC (see 1512010068) is a "legitimate litmus test of the FTC-Google privacy enforcement" for several reasons, said Cleland. He wrote that the FTC has known about the Google Apps for Education privacy problems for nearly two years but hasn't taken action and that EFF's petition generally reflects EU problems with Google's privacy practices. He said the FTC charged Google as a privacy violator in 2011 and 2012, but "abruptly shut down all" Google antitrust investigations after Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was credited "with being very helpful in tilting the 2012 Presidential outcome." Cleland said state attorneys general are expected to "step up" if the FTC doesn't fulfill its enforcement role. Google has denied EFF's allegations and said it keeps students' data private and secure.

Three in every four millennials routinely delete content to free up storage space on their smartphones and later regret it, a survey for Western Digital found. The company commissioned research firm Vanson Bourne to canvass 5,000 consumers aged 16 to 24 in the U.K., France, Germany and the U.S. to analyze how people “create, consume, share and store digital content,” it said in a report. Though many described content on their smartphones as “priceless,” sacrificing a picture or video to free up storage space on the device “is a regular occurrence,” it said. Thirty-one percent said they run out of space on their smartphones on a weekly basis, while 17 percent say this is a daily problem, the company said. “Running out of storage space isn't the greatest challenge threatening mankind at the moment, but it's certainly an annoyance for a great many consumers," it said. "Our findings clearly show that consumers are sacrificing precious memories and valuable content to make more space on their devices." A big reason why deleting content is so prevalent is millenials’ preference for digital forms of media over physical content, it said. “Of the respondents, 48 percent prefer digital versions of music albums compared to 25 percent preferring the hard copy,” it said. “The same goes for films,” with 41 percent of respondents preferring a digital copy versus 29 percent for DVD or Blu-ray, it said. “With an average of five music albums, five feature films and five television shows being downloaded each week by the consumers in the study, it's clear a huge amount of digital media is being consumed.” The findings “support the notion that there is a disconnect among the majority of consumers over how much digital content they consume and create and how much storage they own and need,” the company said Thursday.

In a 2-1 decision, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the conviction of ex-New York City police officer Gilberto Valle, who was charged with improperly accessing a police database -- violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) -- to get information about people in connection to a fantasy role-playing sex fetish community. The court's Thursday opinion also upheld his July 2014 acquittal on a kidnapping conspiracy count. Valle was convicted in March 2013 on the conspiracy count and CFAA violation count. He engaged in email communications and Web chats with members of the Dark Fetish Network, the Internet sex community, said the opinion. "These 'chats' consisted of gruesome and graphic descriptions of kidnapping, torturing, cooking, raping, murdering, and cannibalizing various women." Valle was sentenced to 12 months in custody (essentially a sentence of time served since he already spent 20 months in pretrial detention), one year supervised release and a $25 special assessment, the opinion said. Valle appealed both counts and was acquitted of the conspiracy conviction last year. The government appealed the acquittal and Valle separately appealed the CFAA count. The 2nd Circuit reviewed the question of whether Valle "exceeded authorized access" of the Omnixx Force Mobile computer program, which allows officers to search restricted databases containing sensitive information such as people's home addresses and dates of birth. While Valle admitted he accessed the database for personal use, he said he didn't violate the CFAA since "he never 'used his access to obtain any information he was not entitled to obtain.'” Adopting the prosecution's construction of CFAA "would criminalize the conduct of millions of ordinary computer users," the 2nd Circuit ruled. "While the Government might promise that it would not prosecute an individual for checking Facebook at work, we are not at liberty to take prosecutors at their word in such matters. A court should not uphold a highly problematic interpretation of a statute merely because the Government promises to use it responsibly." Circuit Judges Barrington Parker and Susan Carney ruled in favor of Valle, while Judge Chester Straub dissented. Straub said the majority "discovers ambiguity" in CFAA language "where there is none. Under the plain language of the statute, Valle exceeded his authorized access to a federal database in violation of the CFAA." Straub also said when the jury convicted Valle on the conspiracy count it was "beyond a reasonable doubt, that Valle actually and genuinely conspired to kidnap someone." Straub said "the majority’s eloquent prose on the importance of protecting thoughts from criminal punishment" is more editorial than judicial opinion and "is thus irrelevant, because the jury did not convict Valle for fantasizing." The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had a rundown of the case on its website, filed an amicus brief supporting Valle, along with Center for Democracy & Technology, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and others.

A "major carrier" was expected to have restored Internet connectivity service by 6:40 p.m. Friday to about 250 customer circuits in the Washington area after a hardware failure, an industry official said. "It’s a connectivity outage for one carrier." The connection between the end-user's location and the carrier's network is out, he said. The expert declined to identify the carrier. "One connection could be three people, it could be 3,000 people. I have no idea," he said, referring to the scope of the problem: "And does this happen often? No, it doesn’t happen often. It’s very rare." The official believed mainly businesses were affected, saying most businesses have multiple connections to the Internet. "If this is their only connection, then they’re down," he said. An AT&T spokeswoman said the carrier's wireless service was working normally in the Washington area and it doesn't have wireline Internet operations. Verizon didn't comment Friday.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said it will investigate similar data practices of other companies, a day after it filed a complaint with the FTC that Google was tracking, collecting and mining student data without permission (see 1512010068). EFF wants parents, teachers, school administrators and students at least 13 years old with "first-hand knowledge of other cloud-based education services" to fill out a survey to help the privacy group gather more information about such practices, it said in a Wednesday blog post. While Google has said its tools comply with the law and it abides by a pledge not to track students, EFF said in the post the company is "abusing its position of power as a provider of some educational services to profit off of students' data." But Future of Privacy Forum Executive Director Jules Polonetsky said in a statement Tuesday that EFF's complaint doesn't have any merit. He said the Chrome "sync" setting, which EFF says is the heart of the problem, can be controlled by a school administrator or parent and is a general feature. "We don't believe the complaint raises any issues about data use that are restricted by the Student Privacy Pledge," he said. Google is among the forum's top 10 corporate donors, its website said.

Google signed agreements to add 842 megawatts of renewable energy capacity to power its data centers, the company said in a blog post Thursday. Google called the deal "the largest, and most diverse, purchase of renewable energy ever made by a non-utility company." As a result of the agreements, which boost the company's clean energy across three countries, including Chile and Sweden, Google nearly doubled the amount of renewable energy it has bought, and is now up to 2 gigawatts, it said. The new contracts range from 10 to 20 years, it said.